Aid Coordination and Effectiveness
During the Interim Administration of Afghanistan with support from UNDP, the Afghan Aid Coordination Authority (AACA) was established as a separate entity headed by Dr. Ashraf Ghani. The objective of this entity was to track aid flows to Afghanistan.
Later in 2003, this entity was transferred to the Ministry of Finance under the Budget Department, not as a separate unit, rather Aid Coordination Officers worked in different sectors with the Donors and the Line Ministries together to track and coordinate aid.
In April 2006, a separate unit was established under the Budget Department of the Ministry of Finance called Aid Coordination Unit (ACU) with the objective of ensuring aid effectiveness and Afghan Ownership through aid coordination and management.
Given the importance this unit plays in the aid effectiveness and coordination, it was develop into a directorate named as Aid Management Directorate (AMD) in the year 2009. AMD is headed by an Aid Management Director The objective of Aid Management Directorate is to promote the utilization of aid resources most effectively so the results planned in the ANDS are achieved effectively and efficiently. Its mandate is to manage the influx of the development by ensuring that the assistance is directed at to the priorities set and identified as per the ANDS. AMD subordinates following three sections each of which is headed by a manager
1. Aid Coordination Section
Aid Coordination Section serves as platform of discussion/negotiation between the donors and the Government of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on the allocation of donors’ assistance to projects and programs and other important issues
2. Aid Effectiveness and Policy Section
The objective of this section is to ensure that the donors programs and projects are aligned with the results stipulated in the ANDS
3. Aid Information Management Section
The objective of the section is to function as an information bank on the development assistance and functions as focal point for the development partners
AMD Responsibilities:
The major functions of AMD are aimed:
- To ensure that all aid flows, both core and external are aligned with the ANDS.
- It contributes to formulation of National Development Budget (Core and External) through alignment of donors funding to NDB.
- To encourage and work towards increasing portion of external assistance is delivered through Afghanistan’s core budget.
- To develop policies and strategies to ensure Aid Effectiveness in Afghanistan.
- To Monitor and evaluate the practical application pf the Aid Effectiveness principles (Afghanistan Compact, Paris Declaration, Accra Agenda for Action)
- To provide a forum for dialogue on aid policies and strategies between the Government and Donors.
- To provide support to the implementation of ANDS through effective coordination of aid.
- To facilitate integration of Aid into the national priorities through involvement in high level meeting on the aid effectiveness.
- To Lead and monitor the result framework section in the DAD
- To collect, summarize and analyze the information on ODA and maintain the same in the Donors' Assistance Database
- To work as focal point for the development assistance partners through working as focal point for them.
- To keep updated donor profiles
- To manage grant, loans and aid portfolio
- To carry out Donors Portfolio Reviews
Achievements:
- ACU successfully carried out the Paris Surveys 2006 and 2008.
- It successfully carried out the Afghanistan Development Forum 2007
- It developed the first ever Afghanistan Aid Policy Paper
- The ACU successfully carried out a number of Aid Effectiveness Working Group and Donor Technical Coordination Sub-committee meetings.
- Always provides support to National Budget Preparation.
- Always supports to JCMBs, Consultative Groups and ANDS process.
- ACU initiated and is following up on aid mapping to capture the aid recipient provinces in Afghanistan.
- It successfully Implemented Harmonized Reporting Format to capture aid flows in Afghanistan.
- Other responsibilities that ACU has carried out successfully include: monitoring of loans and grants, technical briefings to senior MoF management on variety of aid related issues, technical opinion on financial agreements.
